DEON VENTER: Avatar

Deon Venter, "Avatar Series: Temple," 2018

oil on linen, 48" x 36"

DEON VENTER: Avatar comprises work from three series: Avatar, Hakeme and Tondo.

“Everything in a Venter painting is available. It is clear to me that he really is a great artist. Of this there can be no question. He is a brilliant painter, wielding a vast and noble theme. His work has power, grandeur, epic ambition and reach and a virtuoso attack.” Gray Michael Dault, OC

Avatar references the Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew, British Columbia, a place Deon Venter often visits for inspiration. Says Venter: “In the rain forest, thousand-year-old trees carve their way through blinding glimpses of the setting or rising sun. There, I can make small sketches to capture the experience of the forest before it’s interpreted and deconstructed in large paintings in my studio. As abstractions of reality, these paintings are allegorical, and each composition is an attempt to capture a spiritual and emotional experience – one that is aligned with the rational search for those timeless truths inherent in the mystical.”

Hakeme is the term for broad-brush slip decoration on Japanese functional pottery. A stiff brush allows for daring strokes which retain fluidity even when linear. The paintings in this group portray mythical thinking both united with and opposed to logic – much like the relationship between the shaman and the craftsman, or theyin and the yang.

The Tondos appear abstract, yet as lenses that offer a unique view into the world, their circularity operates mnemonically as a vector for many different perspectives. The broad brushstrokes on a varying coloured ground could be interpreted as landscape, or at the very least an abstraction of it – or simply, as the artist himself says: